Pump those muscles
Tuesday, October 7th, 2008 02:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
caddymanI have proven to my own satisfaction what really I already knew to be true: to whit, I am quite astoundingly unfit.
Last night I had my first go on thetreadmill exercise bike. Admittedly I had my inaugural pedal after everyone had gone home following the game session and was therefore full of pizza. This is not, of course ideal preparation for exercise and just before going to bed is probably not the best time either, but it would have been easy to put it off and that risks the entire health fascism lifestyle folding before it’s started.
Anyway. Ten minutes. Ten minutes, that’s all and not at a very high resistance setting, to boot. I was fekking knackered and my heart was going nineteen to the dozen for some minutes afterward. Rarely has such a short period of time managed to be so boring and hard work all at the same time. My only consolation is that the first hurdle has been jumped and that Furtle tells me that when you are starting off from a very low base such as I am, there is rapid initial improvement if you stick to it. Of course, then, once you have reached the half hour for no effort, what do you do to reward yourself? Cream cakes, juicy steak? No, you make it harder.
In an earlier post![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bibliovixen suggested that enjoyable ways of exercising might be cycling (proper cycling) or walking to the pub. In reverse order, I think the walk to the pub might be OK, though any calories burnt off by the walk would be more than compensated for by any refreshments imbibed once there. As to the bike well, when I was in my teens (and earlier) I travelled miles on my bike and it was no effort at all, most of the time. Thirty-odd years on, however, the man is rather more than twice the boy that was and the ten minutes on the exercise bike proved that a fair amount has to be done before even considering a real bike. And of course, there is the deep suspicion that cycling in (even outer) London in the noughties is a rather different proposition to cycling in semi-rural Telford and rural Shropshire back in the seventies. I don’t like the thought of driving a car in London, much less belting around the roads without all that metal encasing me!
Still, we shall see. I can’t really make any objective assessment after one ten-minute attempt directly after pizza. Maybe in a fortnight’s time I shall revisit the subject.
If I’m not in the middle of surgery on my cardio-vascular system.
Last night I had my first go on the
Anyway. Ten minutes. Ten minutes, that’s all and not at a very high resistance setting, to boot. I was fekking knackered and my heart was going nineteen to the dozen for some minutes afterward. Rarely has such a short period of time managed to be so boring and hard work all at the same time. My only consolation is that the first hurdle has been jumped and that Furtle tells me that when you are starting off from a very low base such as I am, there is rapid initial improvement if you stick to it. Of course, then, once you have reached the half hour for no effort, what do you do to reward yourself? Cream cakes, juicy steak? No, you make it harder.
In an earlier post
bibliovixen suggested that enjoyable ways of exercising might be cycling (proper cycling) or walking to the pub. In reverse order, I think the walk to the pub might be OK, though any calories burnt off by the walk would be more than compensated for by any refreshments imbibed once there. As to the bike well, when I was in my teens (and earlier) I travelled miles on my bike and it was no effort at all, most of the time. Thirty-odd years on, however, the man is rather more than twice the boy that was and the ten minutes on the exercise bike proved that a fair amount has to be done before even considering a real bike. And of course, there is the deep suspicion that cycling in (even outer) London in the noughties is a rather different proposition to cycling in semi-rural Telford and rural Shropshire back in the seventies. I don’t like the thought of driving a car in London, much less belting around the roads without all that metal encasing me!Still, we shall see. I can’t really make any objective assessment after one ten-minute attempt directly after pizza. Maybe in a fortnight’s time I shall revisit the subject.
If I’m not in the middle of surgery on my cardio-vascular system.